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They and can should count users only by updates. Make a package that is required and only changed upon each release (containing for instance /etc/os-release) a
by devit 2y ago
They and can should count users only by updates.
Make a package that is required and only changed upon each release (containing for instance /etc/os-release) and count how many distinct IP addresses download it.
- jeroenhd 2y agoThey don't host all of the mirrors themselves so they'd be missing out on most of the data that way.
- devit 2y agoThey can host all the default mirrors themselves, either by serving the actual data (with a CDN) or by redirecting requests to a 3rd party mirror by GeoIP.
- jeroenhd 2y agoWhich would be an insanely expensive way to collect very little usable information. Mirrors are run for free by volunteers, a worldwide CDN to replace free mirrors would be prohibitively costly for a relatively small distro like Manjaro.
- hx8 2y agoWouldn't the cost of the service scale basically linearly with the user base? So a small distro would have smaller costs? I agree with the core point that tracking users via package updates is a bad idea, but I don't think this specific argument is very great.
- devit 2y agoPresumably they can use Cloudflare or similar for free or relatively cheap, or perhaps find someone willing to gift CDN service to a Linux distribution. Redirecting the requests to the closest existing mirror also obviously drastically reduces bandwidth requirements and should presumably be doable with a few (for redundancy) colocated dedicated servers running efficient server software.
- richwater 2y ago> distinct IP addresses NAT would like to laugh at you
- cesarb 2y ago> > distinct IP addresses > NAT would like to laugh at you Not just NAT. On many ISPs, power cycling the CPE changes the IP address.
- devit 2y agoIt's an approximation, but if you don't do that, someone creating and updating a container in a loop (or intentionally running wget in a loop) will skew the statistics arbitrarily. I don't think there is a more precise way to do it without compromising privacy. Obviously if you are willing to compromise privacy you can send information such as whether the distribution is running in a container or VM and the NIC MAC address and a persistent identifier, but that would be unacceptable since it is not in the interests of users to send that.
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